Romanie, Romanie

22Jun

Another audacious experiment in narrative, Andrei Ujica’s three-hour documentary is compiled entirely of clips from the Romanian dictator’s own propaganda films, resulting in a mesmerizing collage of sound, image and provocative empty spaces.

Clearly “The Autobiography” will be most profitably enjoyed by viewers familiar with Romanian and Cold War history, but Ujica’s evocative portrait of a cosmopolitan country reduced to an impoverished wasteland is legible and deeply damning even to the most unstudied eye.